Poster Sessions

Poster sessions are a popular feature of AALL conference education, and this year's selections will again be on display in the Exhibit Hall. AALL members have put together a wealth of great ideas to share with Annual Meeting attendees – you can view them all by track below. Creators of accepted posters will be on hand during the poster session presentation period on Tuesday, July 21 from 9:45-10:45 a.m. to answer questions and discuss their work, but the posters will be on display throughout the entirety of the Annual Meeting. Don't miss this chance to see what your busy colleagues are up to in their libraries – and get inspired!

The Legal Information Preservation Alliance (LIPA) focuses on digitization for remote access and ease of use, as well as creating opportunities and partnerships for members to preserve print primary materials. Our poster will provide an overview of LIPA's PALMPrint preservation project, highlight the importance of trustworthiness when digitizing primary legal materials, and present resources for libraries considering digitization of print primary legal materials in the areas of funding, registries and shared metadata standards, and collaborative digitization options.

Stephanie Davidson, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Save Time and Money – Use JTacq for Collection Development

JTacq is a free collection development/purchasing application compatible with many ILS systems. While it does not replace the ILS acquisitions system, it streamlines the decision and ordering process. Work previously done by hand, consuming many hours, can now be done in minutes. JTacq saves money through vendor price comparisons, saves time searching and reviewing, and allows for the easy and efficient involvement of public services librarians, faculty librarians, and collection development librarians, creating a collection best suited to the needs of your faculty and students. In these times of flat or decreasing budgets, many libraries can benefit from JTacq.

Joan A. Policastri, University of Colorado Law School, William A. Wise Law Library

General or Core Programs

At the Nexus of Outreach and Service – Facilitating a Multi-State Virtual Legal Book Drive

In an effort to connect and engage its membership, which is spread out over the six New England states, LLNE’s Service Committee conceived of a non-law public library book drive project that would increase access to legal information and promote law libraries. This poster will detail the steps of how the committee structured, promoted, and completed the project, which ultimately resulted in the donation of one collection of legal texts to a non-law public library in each of the New England states. Additionally, the project increased the committee's membership by 300 and led the committee to continue outreach efforts to non-law public librarians in a multi-phase, multi-year project. The goal of the poster would be to inspire other chapters or organizations to replicate the book drive and continue the giving. Learn more about the project here.

Rebecca Martin, Boston University School of Law; Nicole Dyszlewski, Roger Williams University School of Law

Crowdsourcing: How to Get a New Library Logo Using “the Crowd”

The Minnesota State Law Library has had several logo redesigns, the last time being in 1998 with the outdated motto, "first rung on the ladder of justice." To begin redesigning the library’s overall online presence (e.g., web site, Twitter, and Facebook pages), a professional-looking library logo was needed. Two main obstacles were the lack of an on-staff designer and a meagre budget. The library staff researched "crowdsourcing" and how other organizations used "the crowd" to develop innovative marketing and outreach initiatives. After reviewing different logo design crowdsourcing sites, the team chose logosauce.com to crowdsource the logo redesign. This poster will show how the Minnesota State Law Library, applying AALL core competency 1.8, used creativity, negotiation, risk-taking, critical thinking in decision making, and collaboration in working with the "the crowd" when selecting the right logo. The library also used core competency 1.13 in its execution of the logo redesign in terms of advocating use of "the crowd" and communicating the project and winning results to its stakeholders. Viewers will be able to explain to their own stakeholders the pros and cons of using crowdsourcing in their libraries, as well as how to complete a crowdsourcing project.

Danielle Becker and Liz Reppe, Minnesota State Law Library

The Lyon Declaration on Access to Information and Development

In August 2014, the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) launched the Lyon Declaration on Access to Information and Development, outlining the need for access to information to be recognized in the United Nations post-2015 development framework. To date, more than 540 institutions and associations – including libraries, development agencies, and media organizations – have signed the Lyon Declaration. AALL became a signatory in November 2014. This poster will set forth the principles of the Lyon Declaration, how it fits into the UN's development framework, and the activities by IFLA officers and members to promote access to information within the United Nations and globally.

Anne E. Burnett, University of Georgia Law Library

There's a Competency for That! Standards for the Successful Legal Researcher

The PSLRC can be seen as problem-solving applications or best practices, which can be implemented to solve research challenges. The poster will highlight the AALL online information center that makes the case for competency, provides material for further reading, and shares examples of legal research competency assessment. The poster will also feature illustrations of effective use of the PSLRC in legal research education, in instruction and assessment, in various work environments, and as an essential part of professional development to enhance practice skills. Additionally, there will be take-away Legal Research Competency brochures and bookmarks invoking various research scenarios.

The PSLRC moves AALL toward its "Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal": AALL and its members will be the recognized authority in all aspects of legal information. Further, the PSLRC plays a role in AALL's vivid description of its desired future and each of its three-year goals.

Mary Jenkins, Hamilton County Law Library; Gail A. Partin, Dickinson School of Law Library of the Pennsylvania State University

Unlikely Partners – SLU Law and St. Louis Civil Courts Library

The Vincent C. Immel Law Library at Saint Louis University, a private academic library, and the Law Library Association of St. Louis, a government-funded membership library, established a formal partnership in 2014. This poster will display the areas in which they have partnered, including cataloging, events, and vendor negotiations. It will also indicate the benefits of the partnership and encourage other libraries to seek unconventional partnerships for the betterment of their patrons.

Corie Renee Dugas, Saint Louis University Law Library

Visual Effects: Why Your Library Should Go Graphic

As the Florida State Law Research Center will demonstrate, hiring a graphic designer will add value to your library in the realms of student outreach, organizational collaboration, instructional design, professional involvement, and facility look-and-feel. Learn the possibilities for your own organization as you see the benefits of embracing the visualized world in which we live.

Kathryn Crandall, Florida State Law Research Center

Information Technology

A Crop Like No Other: Harvesting and Leveraging Explanatory Parentheticals

Imagine a free database filled with hundreds of thousands of concise case summaries, all of them written by judges. Sound too good to be true? Such a database does, in fact, exist – the output of an ongoing research project at the Stanford Center for Legal Informatics. Using powerful but simple data-mining techniques, the author extracted "explanatory parentheticals" from a corpus of more than one million opinions. The resulting database is remarkable in both its depth and coverage – more than 90,000 cases have been summarized.

The poster will describe the process of harvesting the parentheticals, display interesting statistics about them, and demonstrate ways they can be utilized. Additional space will be dedicated to other patterns in the common law that can be leveraged to auto-generate exceedingly useful databases.

Pablo Arredondo, Stanford Center for Legal Informatics / Casetext

Best Practices for Search Engine Optimization of Legal Scholarship

Students and scholars are increasingly moving away from traditional research databases toward algorithm-driven search engines like Google Scholar. After researching how these algorithms work, best practices were developed and implemented to maximize legal scholarship online, driving an organization’s articles or faculty's articles to the top of the search results.

This poster will demonstrate how Google Scholar's ranking algorithm works, explain why law librarians should care about the way Google Scholar ranks search results, and illustrate the four best practices to implement in order to maximize the online presence of an organization's legal scholarship.

This poster details creating a content management system that captures faculty achievements and supports internal and external marketing, web profiles, and merit reporting. Led by the Assistant Dean of IT and Associate Dean for Research, technology and library staff are collaborating to build a database front-end for faculty input and a citation generator for output. Still a work in progress, the project seeks to contribute to the scholarly culture of Temple Law School by connecting faculty with each other and the world.

Noa Kaumeheiwa, Temple University Law School Library

Evaluating Your Space with Location Analytics

As law libraries adapt to the changing needs of its users and move away from maintaining large print collections, librarians have to make tough decisions about what to do with their space. Collecting meaningful data about how space is used gives librarians the ability to make more data-driven decisions and articulate value in reports. This poster will show a JavaScript-based app that attempts to accomplish this by providing user-friendly tools for library staff to collect location data and display the results as a "heatmap." The app enables library staff to quickly visualize and understand where people go after they enter the library, enriching their understanding of their users' habits and needs.

Timothy Dannay and Jessica Panella, University of Connecticut School of Law Library

It Takes a Village: Using LibGuides, LibCal, and Google Apps for Education to Manage Our Legal Research Skills for Practice Program

This poster demonstrates how Boston University's Fineman and Pappas Law Libraries use LibGuides, LibCal, and Google Apps for Education to manage their Legal Research Skills for Practice Program. In an era where everyone is being asked to make more with less, this poster illustrates how librarians can use tools already in their arsenal to efficiently manage large programs. Learn how these libraries register students for classes and workshops, manage instructional space, distribute and collect assignments, receive feedback, and maintain program statistics. Come see how a variety of diverse resources can be combined to create a system that will facilitate your next library event.

Jenna Fegreus and Ellen Frentzen, Boston University School of Law, Fineman and Pappas Law Libraries

Library Management

Applying Process to the Library

"Process" is a series of activities occurring within an institution that lead to a specific end. Most often, it focuses on meeting the needs of the users and delivering a service that will fulfill that need. It is often a collection of interrelated process tools that function in a logical sequence to achieve an ultimate goal. At the Charlotte School of Law, the adoption of process allows the institution to stay practice-ready and student outcome-centered. In the library, process is being applied to all projects and initiatives, resulting in an improvement of functionality and focus on the services it provides. This poster will give examples of the Charlotte School of Law Library's adoption of the following processes: project charters, brainstorming, pro-con, agendas, action plans, and priority matrices.

Kathleen Brown, Charlotte School of Law

To FDLP or Not to FDLP – That Is the Question

Explore key issues that law libraries should consider when addressing the question of continued participation in the Federal Depository Library Program. This topic relates to AALL's Core Organizational Values, including:
•equitable and permanent public access to legal information
•continuous improvement in access to justice
•community and collaboration
•the essential role of law librarians within their organizations and in a democratic society

Artie W. Berns and Rena K. Stoeber, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Texas County Law Library Legislative Proposal: Where We've Been and Where We Intend to Go in 2017

The Texas Legislature holds session once every other year. Lubbock County chose to be the trailblazer and propose a legislative initiative to recover lost fees for county law libraries. The proposal was not a new fee, but an attempt to recover what was previously allotted to the libraries as a fee in district court. This poster session looks at the positive efforts and mistakes made during the 2015 session, and looks ahead to the 2017 session. It also examines where the filing fees go, as well as the cost benefit of having such a proposed piece of legislation on the books. The goal is to show the benefit to the JP (Justice of the Peace) litigant. During the 2015 session, many asked what JP litigants would get for their $5 or $10 civil filing fee, and this poster session attempts to, in part, show the impact the revenue could make in small or mid-range counties like Lubbock. User statistics for Lubbock County will be shown, along with other analytical and empirical data. The goal is to show the justification for the fee and provide directives for the 2017 session.

Sara Campbell, Lubbock County Law Library

We've Got to Move It!

Moving a library is a challenging project under any circumstances, but more so when you cannot hire professional library movers. This poster will discuss the Fordham University Law Library’s move, completed with traditional office movers. It will showcase the moving plan, including the tools used to organize the physical movement of the books, the ways in which staff was deployed, the staff member training, and the end results.

Alissa Black-Dorward and Todd Melnick, Fordham University Law Library

Reference, Research, and Client Services

"In the News": Creating an Institutional News Monitoring Service

In coordination with the communications office, the Georgetown Law Library recently launched "Georgetown Law in the News," an institutional news monitoring and distribution service that provides timely, useful information about news coverage of the law school community and demonstrates library value.

Each day, library staff identifies news stories about the law school, faculty, students, and alumni and enter citations and links to the news stories in a database created by the library's electronic resources and services department. Once entered in the database and approved by the communications department, the news stories are then automatically distributed to the law school community through a variety of channels. News stories featuring particular faculty members, for example, appear on the faculty members' online profiles.

This poster will further describe how "Georgetown Law in the News" works, as well as the benefits and challenges of providing this service.

Examine an unconventional way to fill voids in a library's parent entity. In this case, the parent law school was working diligently to expand its course offerings in health law and other healthcare-related fields. This was an opportunity to proactively design an unconventional legal research course, Health Law Research, in support of the law school's mission. Gain insight on how the course was created and offered to the curriculum committee, as well as understand best practices for finding and filling voids in any parent entity.

Christina Glon, Emory University School of Law

Comparison of Research Speed and Accuracy Using WestlawNext and Lexis Advance

In 2010, Thompson Reuters released a new legal search engine to the legal academy called WestlawNext. WestlawNext’s Google-like searching revolutionized the legal research process, bringing it up-to-date for a generation of lawyers raised on Google. LexisNexis followed with its own next-generation search engine, Lexis Advance, first releasing it to academic law libraries in 2011 and updating it several times since then – most significantly in September 2014.

Melanie Knapp and Rob Willey, George Mason University Law Library

Crystal Balls, Tea Leaves, and Presumptions: Why Librarians Need to Take a More Active Role in Assessing User Needs and Desires

Remaining cognizant of your students' communication needs is an essential and ongoing factor in providing effective reference service. Are your students looking for e-chat or non-traditional reference services? It is easy to believe that you know your students' needs because you know your students, but that may not be the case. A recent survey indicated that in just a few short years, University of Illinois law students’ views on alternative options for reference services changed dramatically, unbeknownst to reference faculty. To best meet the needs of your students, it is imperative not to assume that you know your students’ needs without asking them.

This poster will utilize those survey results to demonstrate why librarians need to regularly survey their user population to inquire about library services. It will also address why it is important to include both those services you expect users to want, as well as those you presume they will not want.

Rena K. Stoeber and Michelle Hook Dewey, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Customizing a Legal Research Ontology for Teaching 1Ls

This poster will present a legal research ontology customized for use in 1L legal research instruction. It uses case law, statutory law, and secondary sources to assist students in seeing the bigger picture of legal research. The poster will also explain what a legal research ontology is, how it is constructed, and how it can be customized for different fact patterns and sources.

Amy Taylor, American University Washington College of Law

Empirical Legal Research Support Services: A National Survey of Law Libraries

Empirical legal research is a significant and growing portion of legal scholarship. It is the investigation of legal and justice system-related questions through data-driven observation and analysis. Law libraries of all types may find that supporting empirical research – from identifying data sets, to helping individuals analyze data, to archiving the results of their work – is a requested service from some patrons. This project will share the results of a nationwide survey conducted in the spring of 2015 on the extent and nature of empirical research services provided by academic law libraries. As the requests for these services increase, it will also be imperative that court, firm, and other types of law librarians understand basic support mechanisms. The study will benefit law librarians by improving their knowledge of the empirical research services available and being provided by peers.

Allison C. Reeve, University of Kansas, Wheat Law Library; Travis Weller, University of Kansas, Institute for Policy & Social Research

Expanding Your Library’s Current Awareness Lineup

The Fineman and Pappas Law Libraries staff expanded its current awareness strategy to meet the evolving demands of faculty research practices and preferences for prompt electronic delivery of the most recently published information and developments in the legal field. This poster will detail how an interdepartmental library task force researched, structured, and implemented an electronic current awareness delivery service for its law faculty. Transitioning 28 faculty members from print to electronic routing allowed the library to serve faculty more quickly with simultaneous cost savings. To date, library staff members manage electronic routing for approximately 175 unique titles using a variety of customizable delivery options for current content, including JournalTOCs, MyHein Title Alerts, and publisher-specific resources. The goal of this poster is to provide other libraries with examples of how to take advantage of automated services for current research content and encourage those libraries to reap the benefits associated with implementing these services.

Jennifer Robble, Corinne Griffiths, and Rebecca Y. Martin, Boston University School of Law, Fineman and Pappas Law Libraries

Law4AZ: Advancing Access to Justice

The goal of the Law4AZ project is to increase access to justice statewide by connecting people to legal information through their public libraries. Currently, the project consists of two phases. The first phase is training for public library staff conducted by a law librarian from the State Library of Arizona. The second phase involves the participating libraries hosting attorney presentations for the public. Law4AZ supports AALL’s values and goals by increasing public access to legal information, fostering collaboration between law libraries and public libraries, and promoting access to justice. This poster will describe the project, highlight the benefits, and outline future plans. Data about the legal needs of the target communities and feedback on the project from participants will also be shared.

The Interdisciplinarity of Legal Research: Exploring Issues Related to Film Literature and the Arts

Legal research isn't just for law students and lawyers. With an ever-growing need for libraries to justify their worth and seek opportunities for collaboration, raising awareness of the interdisciplinarity of legal resources can be critical. Focusing on the arts, this session will explore issues such as copyright, licensing, censorship, and government funding to show that legislative materials have particular value to a general audience. Using examples from film and literature, this poster will show how these sources enrich interdisciplinary research and explain why they are essential to teaching and learning in the broader scholarly community.

Teaming Up for Success: Librarians as an Integral Part of a Law School Academic Success Program

In the current information climate, librarians are constantly looking for new ways to integrate themselves and their libraries with parent institutions. Coordinating with non-library programs is one way to demonstrate the library's value to institutional stakeholders. Librarians at UNT Dallas College of Law got involved early and have been working with the Academic Success Program since the law school first opened in the fall of 2014. They have partnered with administrators and doctrinal faculty to offer their unique skills and experiences in support of the law school's student body. This poster will introduce some of the instructional sessions and services provided by the librarians as part of the law school's Academic Success Program for first-year law students.